Helpful hints and friendly notes from the world-acclaimed photography instructors at BetterPhoto.com

May 03, 2007

Transforming An Image into a Painting

By Scott Stulberg

I recently returned from a month in Europe and was lucky to spend a few days in Venice, Italy. I didn’t always have the perfect light and had to shoot some images in bright afternoon light rather than early morning or late afternoon soft, warm light. As many of you know, the best times of day to get that beautiful light are sunrise and sunset lighting….but we can’t always get that perfect light.
I took some photographs during the mid day in the canals in Venice anyway , hoping to later transform them in Photoshop to something decent. The harsh lighting, bright areas and strong shadows make midday shooting not the best time to have your camera out. And shooting stock photography, which is what I was shooting in Europe, demands you searching for the best light available.

Many of you probably have many photographs that were shot in bad times of the day. I want to show you a photoshop plug-in that can salvage some of these photos and in the process, make some stunning painterly like images out of them.

Buzz is a photoshop plug-in , which is one of the Photoshop filters that I show in my Photoshop Tips , Tricks and Filter Magic class here at BetterPhoto.com®. I love experimenting with Photoshop plug-ins and have been playing with them and showing them to others for many years. Buzz is one of the most amazing filters that I have ever used and I highly recommend it to anyone wishing to create paintings from their images.

The following image…..the view from the Rialto Bridge in Venice, I used the plug-in Buzz to transform my photograph to something that I like much more. After you download the plug-in from Fo2PiX at http://www.fo2pix.com/index.php, it can sometimes be tricky to install. But it is worth the effort. It also is pretty finicky at times, often crashing your computer…and not wanting to work on files bigger than 30 megabytes most of the time. But even with the drawbacks, it is relatively easy to use and can help you create some amazing paintings from your images. One little trick is to increase the saturation after using Buzz because the plug-in reduces much of the saturation, and looks very muted afterwards. Adding a good amount of saturation improves the final image dramatically. Below, is the original photo before I used Buzz.